After Annihilation: 10 strange sci-fi books that should be on screen

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With Netflix's adaptation of Richard Morgan’s body-hopping cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon, Alex Garland directing the adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s weird and symbolist novel Annihilation and The Expanse’s third season set for release on Syfy this year, any number of SF and fantasy novels that were once thought unfilmable are now making their way to the screen. Here are 10 brilliant and strange books and series that could do with a nod from the TV commissioners…

The work of Ursula Le Guin, who died last month, is rich ground in general for prospective adapters — they might also have a look at The Lathe of Heaven, in which a man dreams world-ending horrors into existence, and the anarchist fable The Dispossessed — but this extraordinary novel, in which an interplanetary ambassador lands on a world of androgynes who become male or female once a month, is surely in first place. This is one of the books in which Le Guin struck a perfect balance between her talent for plotting and her gift for imaginative anthropology, weaving a story of Thrones-like diplomacy, intrigue and betrayal against a fascinating (and still startling) social backdrop.

Effinger's novel is set in a futuristic Islamic version of New OrleansCredit:
Arbor House

Published in 1986, two years after William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this extraordinary first book in a sequence of three is, criminally, still nothing like as well known as its cyberpunk confederate. Set in a future society where the Islamic world has become a federated superpower and the US and Europe are in decline, it follows a street kid turned investigator on the hunt for a neurologically-enhanced serial killer. Mixing the culture and ritual of Islam with a gritty SF plot full of brain-chips, smart drugs, personality transformations and technological lowlives, it's rare and memorable stuff.

In a more sane universe, these black-hearted guilty pleasures would be entering their fourth season on Netflix already. Part hacker comedy, part occult thriller and part warm-beer espionage drama, Stross's longrunning series imagines the men and women of a secret British government agency facing off against Lovecraftian unspeakables, mad elves, vampire stockbrokers and, greatest of horrors, the British political class. The conceit is that sufficiently advanced coding is industinguishable from magic (rooted iPhones to run cantrips, speed cameras zap malefactors with a basilisk gaze), Stross keeps the whole thing neatly balanced on a knife edge between spoof and seriousness, and the two protagonists, one armed with an itchy Linux finger and the other with an ageless demon violin, are a delight as well.

Lord Of Light was optioned for a film in 1979 but never made. Notes and drawing from the project were used in the CIA mission immortalised in ArgoCredit:
SF Masterworks

Zelazny’s Amber novels, about a royal family who preside over a network of multidimensional universes, are sci-fi classics; the Walking Dead writer Robert Kirkman was reported some time ago to be working on an Amazon adaptation, of which nothing has been heard since. Screenwriters hoping to steal a march might look to Lord of Light instead, a set of linked stories set in the far future on a distant world whose Earth colonists, technologically enhanced and corrupt beyond imagination, have adopted the identities of the Hindu pantheon to rule over the planet's natives. Only one disruptive techno-Buddhist holds out hope of salvation. Zelazny’s mixture of narrative cunning with whoa-man Seventies hippyism make this story silly, exciting, grandiose and affecting in approximately equal measure.

The late Iain M Banks’s Culture novels imagine a galaxy-spanning society run on broadly anarchist principles; currency is irrelevant, resources are plentiful, administration is governed by superintelligent philosophical AIs and member states and individuals can, pretty much, do what the hell they want. It’s a vast territory of imagination, so large that prospective adapters need to choose carefully. The first Culture book, Consider Phleabus, is now being made into a TV series by Amazon. But a better way in would be this self-contained tale of an ambassador sent (with a philosophically-minded drone for company) to a world that settles its conflicts by means of a huge, society-spanning and strategically opaque game.

Ann Leckie's first novel won pretty much all the science fiction world's top prizes when it appeared, and it's not hard to see why: this deftly-plotted piece of grand-scale space opera gestures to its illustrious forerunners in the genre (Banks, Le Guin) but stands confidently on its own distant and alien ground. It's set in a society that doesn't recognise or understand gender, in which superintelligent AIs control not just the systems of starships but whole battalions of cloned human crew as well. The protagonist Breq -- mind of a troop carrier starship, body of a human -- is a brilliant invention, and things only get weirder from there.

La Compagnie des Glaces (The Ice Company), Georges-Jean Arnaud

The books were adapted into a videogame called Transartica where you fight your enemies with trainsCredit:
Silmarils

This 97-volume sequence of French science-fiction novels, most of which have never been translated to English, was in fact made into a hilariously dreadful Canadian television series in 2007, but the bigger budgets and higher aspirations of today's TV might do better justice to its sprawling doompocalypse. In the far future Earth's moon has exploded, the planet has entered a new ice age, and society is controlled by the huge corporate entities that run trains through the freezing wilderness. In the right hands, this could be sci-fi TV on the scale of Battlestar Galactica.

A Le Carré-like spy story set in the ruins of the European Union: does any book on this list cry out louder for immediate adaptation? This first novel in a splendidly acidic trilogy follows an Estonian chef-turned-spy through a future society where, after a global pandemic, the prosperous continent fractures into fiefdoms -- margravates, principalities, Länder -- resembling those of the early modern period. Against this strange backdrop, the Coureurs des Bois, a network of high-tech secret agents, specialise in smuggling people and goods across the new Europe's infinity of borders: "I like to think," says one spymaster, "that I am keeping alive the spirit of Schengen." Written some time before the Brexit balloon went up, these twisty thrillers are enough to make anyone think twice about taking back control.

A plucky teenager wins a place at a university of the arcane arts, discovering her own superpowers in the process … every genre has its tropes, and SF and fantasy are particularly fond of this one. In the Binti sequence of novellas, however, Nnedi Okorafor offers an unorthodox spin on the idea: the protagonist is a genius-level Namibian mathematician, the first of her tribe of private technologists to attend an off-world university, and the studious vibe is shattered when all her classmates get slaughtered on their way to matriculation by a race of telepathic space jellyfish. Subtitle problems aside (there's a great deal of space-jellyfish banter), this sharp and surprising fiction by a rising Nigerian-American author would make a fascinating series: part Star Trek, part Harry Potter, part Enemy Mine.

Alternate-historico-fantasy, magic-punk Soviet noir - I don't know what shelf you'd put Wolfhound Century on in the bookshop, but Higgins's fabulously bizarre setting is ripe for adaptation. A policeman hunts a bomb-throwing anarchist through a repressive society modelled on 1940s Russia, but incorporating aspects of Slavic myth and multiverse fantasy: giants are used as slave labour, forests have minds of their own, dead and not-so-dead angels are falling to earth … If retro stuff like The Man in the High Castle piqued your attention, a TV version of this would blow your mind.